"Do They Ever Return to Possess the Living?" This is The Innocents. This British gothic psychological horror film directed by Jack Clayton, adapted by William Archibald and Truman Capote, and based on Archibald's 1950 stage play of the same title and the 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. The plot follows a governess who watches over two children and comes to fear that their large estate is haunted by ghosts and that the children are being possessed.
In both his stage and screen adaptations, Archibald wrote under the assumption that the supernatural experiences of Miss Giddens were real, and that the ghosts she encountered were legitimate entities as opposed to figments of her imagination (a possibility left unresolved in James's original work). However, Clayton envisioned a more ambiguous conclusion for the film. Clayton was ultimately unhappy with Archibald's screenplay due to their conflicting interpretations of the material, and asked Capote (whom he had met while working on Beat the Devil) to rework Archibald's script. At the time, Capote was in the middle of writing In Cold Blood; however, because he was a fan of the James novella, he agreed, and took a three-week hiatus to rewrite the screenplay. Capote introduced the Freudian symbolism that is prominently highlighted in the relationships and visual compositions of the film, with implications that the supernatural phenomena experienced by Miss Giddens are a result of her own sexual repression and paranoias rather than legitimate paranormal experiences. Clayton later brought in writer John Mortimer to give the dialogue a "Victorian" polish. Clayton intended to maintain a sense of claustrophobia and, at the same time, open up the play, which took place entirely in the drawing room of the house. Clayton saw the house as one of the characters in the film and used it as such to highlight certain scenes. Harold Pinter also worked on the screenplay. Pinter advised Clayton that he should not use flashbacks. Deborah Kerr was cast in the lead role of Miss Giddens at the counsel of the film's studio and distributor, 20th Century Fox, despite the fact that the governess character in James's original work was twenty years old (Kerr was forty at the time). Kerr was said to have regarded this as her finest performance. Clayton cast Pamela Franklin (in her film debut) as Flora, and Martin Stephens as her brother, Miles. Clytie Jessop was cast as the spectral Miss Jessel (also in her film debut), and Peter Wyngarde was cast in the role of Quint. Alec Guinness and Cary Grant had expressed a strong interest in playing the role of Quint. However, Clayton turned them down.
Principal photography took place primarily at Shepperton Studios in Surrey. Interior sequences were shot on sound stages, as well as the sequences which took place in the greenhouse veranda; a façade for Bly house was also built by the art department on the studio lot. On-location exterior scenes were shot at the Gothic mansion of Sheffield Park in East Sussex. Clayton wanted the film to be quite different from the Hammer horror films of the period, and employed a number of cinematic devices to achieve this end, including using eerie sound effects and moody, stylised lighting. Clayton didn't want the children to be exposed to the darker themes of the story, so they never saw the screenplay in its entirety. The children were given their pages the day before they were to be filmed. 20th Century Fox insisted that the film be shot in CinemaScope, while Clayton wanted to shoot it in standard academy ratio, feeling that he would be unable to make use of the additional space on both sides of the frame. Cinematographer Freddie Francis insisted that he could work with the CinemaScope aspect ratio, having shot Sons and Lovers (1960) for director Jack Cardiff in the format. He used colour filters and used the lighting rig to create darkness consuming everything at the edge of the frame. As the shoot progressed, Clayton found uses for the edges of the screen and began composing for the CinemaScope format. Francis used deep focus and narrowly aimed the lighting towards the centre of the screen. To create such sharp visuals, Francis used lots of huge bright lamps. Kerr sometimes had to resort to wearing sunglasses between takes. He also had candles custom made with four or five wicks entwined to produce more light. Francis and Clayton framed the film in an unusually bold style, with characters prominent at the edge of the frame and their faces at the centre in profile in some sequences, which, again, created both a sense of intimacy and unease, based on the lack of balance in the image. For many of the interior night scenes, Francis painted the sides of the lenses with black paint to allow for a more intense, "elegiac" focus. During principal photography, Clayton and editor Jim Clark would meet each evening and view the footage shot that day, assembling daily rough cuts as they progressed; this allowed Clayton to make adjustments and shoot pick-ups along the way, giving him closer supervision during the filming process. Inspired by George Stevens' A Place in the Sun, Clark crafted numerous dissolves and superimpositions, which he also described as "mini montages", in which he edited the cross-fades between certain scenes to run four or five times longer than the standard "mix", and often blended in a third, near-subliminal image. Clayton maintained close supervision over the editing of the film, specifically making sure that no single scene ran too long; because of the film's small cast.
Dripping with perverse subtext, this 1961 adaptation of James’ 1898 novella is a master class in reading between the lines (or the images). The film endures as a horror classic, albeit one that doesnt quite the credit it deserves as an unusual sexual repression story. Heres a movie both scary and perverse as Hell.
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment